


Bread and Apples

by watsonmycompass



Category: The Last Kingdom (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Fluff, Giving Birth, Mentions of Death, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Pregnancy, brief mentions of abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-14
Updated: 2017-05-14
Packaged: 2018-10-29 23:46:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10864629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/watsonmycompass/pseuds/watsonmycompass
Summary: Her heart is singing with the wind. She loves him, she loves him, she loves him and it's gentle and kind and everything she'd always known in her chest it would be.Aethelflaed fights, and remembers.





	Bread and Apples

**Author's Note:**

> sorry about this guys! it's kind of a mess but i've edited it so much at this point I'm a bit worried if I don't post it now I won't post it at all. this is the second ever aethelrik fic at the time of writing. which sucks for multiple reasons but namely because the only other one, Love Is Supposed To Be Gentle by citra_talugmai, is so so good! it sets the highest of bars, which I came nowhere near close to reaching--go read it! :)  
> edit: there's another one! and it also nearly had me in tears, the characterisation is so! so!! good!! It's called Tomorrow by redenzione and it's up on their tumblr (with cute sidepairing of uhtred x gisela and the possibility of a sequel!! please make sure you go and give these clever talented some love if you have a minute xxx

It hurts.

Sometimes she can hear the howling of the wind over her own, when she grows too tired even to keen. Her breathing is like a tidepool, swirling in and out of her lungs, impossible to prolong or catch for more than a moment in this dance--the endless dance of her body with nature, with pain. It's dark, like a sickroom. The women shut out all the light as her labour progressed--as the hours passed and it didn't. She can hear the low murmur of their praying as it rises above the gentling wind, and she turns her head towards it like a child seeking comfort; finds none. She is a princess of Wessex and the lady of Mercia, but at the moment she is only Aethelflaed; fighting a battle which she has no idea whether or not she can win.

She'd called out for him, when the pain first grew too large and black for her eyes to see and her vision had faded into nothingness. _Erik_. Then there was only _please god please let us live_ and for a moment after _please god let us die I want I want I need to be with him where it is warm and safe_ and he had always made her feel safe. Wasn't that strange? Even surrounded by men who wanted to frighten her to the very core she knew somehow she would be all right, had the courage to look him in the eye and bargain with him as her equal. The bread and apples she'd wolfed down as soon as the door closed behind him... they'd been the best she'd ever tasted, and she knew after somehow that no food would ever taste as sweet again.

In the months that passed after she lost him-after he fell, his insides red and ragged and ruined--her belly grew round and she often found herself craving apples. She would sit and eat them one by one, pare each of them with the bite of the silver knife she'd kept about her skirts since the night Erik's brother thrust his sword into her heart as surely as if he'd planted it among her ribs and their old dream burned with Beamfleot. (It's one of Uhtred's knives. When she'd asked him for it he'd looked at her so long and steady she'd been sure he would refuse. Instead he'd taken one of her hands, clasped it gently around the dagger's hilt, and when his own hand came away she saw it was smeared with Sigefrid's blood.)

The women watched her ever warily, she remembers--watched the gleam of her knife and her fingers sticky sweet with the fruit's pale, dusky juice--as warily on those days as they always did after she came back as someone different than the Aethelflaed who'd left, their Lord's fair and chastened young wife. _They've heard me call out to Erik,_ she thinks to herself suddenly as she tries to pant along with the spasms of her womb, but it's a distant thought floating through a haze of pain.

Would Erik have brought her apples, when her belly swelled? Would he have looked at her with the same confused tenderness in his eyes as on the day they'd made their bargain?

The pain rips through her again, and she hears rather than feels her cry, the way her muscles contract. It's gone just as suddenly--as if it no longer belongs to her--the warm, yellowish light of tallow candles filling the room. She can still hear the wind, singing softly as it rushes past ancient stone... and he's beside her, his presence as warm and solid as it always was. She reaches for him with blind tears dripping down her cheeks. Then his hands are in her hair, gentle and strong, she presses her face into his chest and the rest of the world begins to fall away. He cradles her face in his hands, tips her chin up to look at him with the same characteristic tenderness in his eyes as the first time he ever truly touched her, under Màni's moon. Whatever he sees there brings a furrow to his brow and she moves faster than thought to press her lips to it, fierce with sorrow and joy, until it's gone.

Her heart is singing with the wind. She loves him, she loves him, she loves him and it's gentle and kind and everything she'd always known in her chest it would be.

She starts to laugh, joyful and unrestrained, and the look of amazed confusion (tinged with disgruntlement) on his face when he pulls back to look at her only makes it worse. In a moment she is hiccoughing into his chest, peals of laughter smothered as unsuccessfully as her smile.

"A lesser man might be upset if his bedmate laughed as you do, Lady, but _I_ am not concerned--"

He breaks off with genuine apprehension at the noise she makes trying to stifle the fresh bout of laughter his words cause, looks into her face with a worried, searching gaze; but the arms holding her to him relax somewhat when she shifts closer and smiles up at him. He makes an indignant sound in his throat she has only ever heard Danes make--they are expressive in a strange, free way that the men of her father's court are not--mutters something to himself in his own harsh, lovely language. But he smiles into her hair and pulls her more securely on to his chest so she is draped over him. She makes an approving sound, and it is his turn to huff out a laugh.

It's been a while since she laughed like this. And longer since--ever in truth--she has felt so free, for all she was not a serious child. She had grown more somber with age, the dark days before Ethandun tempering her childish laughter with thoughtfulness and self-restraint--as it had all her family. If that despair had beaten her father to iron, unbreakable and unbending, it had taught his daughter to trust in those who fought for them, and always to hope for better days.

Then there had been Aethelred, and for weeks she'd believed she might never smile a true smile again. What did it matter if better days were coming, when her nights were full of humiliation and pain? 

Erik's breath is hot and comforting on the skin of her neck, where he has buried his head in her shoulder. She lets out the breath she hadn't meant to hold in in a rush, but he must have felt her tension because his eyelashes tickle her skin and he cups a hand to the back of her neck, tightening the other around her hip protectively. His voice is slow and watchful when he asks,

"Are you well, lady?"

She can tell from the way his fingers drift over the skin of her neck, achingly slow and ever so careful, that it's a question he already knows the answer to. All the same, she draws back to look at him; traces the strong line of his eyebrow with her thumb and watches his pupils dilate at her gentleness.

She will not go back. She takes comfort in the fact that she cannot. Either she or Wessex died the moment the Dane warrior caught her arm in the forest and dragged her back to the brothers. The moment she rode across the threshold of Beamfleot's fortress with Erik's arms around her waist and all hope of rescue perished, so did she.

If her father is tempered iron then she is steel, and she will not be responsible for the destruction of his England. She's grateful though--awfully, fiercely, desperately grateful--that in her dying days fate has permitted her to taste so much, finally, of what it is to be alive. She looks down at Erik, his chest rising and falling steadily beneath her fingers, her gaze unwavering as it meets his. His eyes burn as they pass over her and they do not falter, but there is a gentleness in them too. It hurts to look at him so she doesn't let herself stop, she looks and looks and aches with the knowledge that soon she will be losing him. That the candles which light this small room will one day burn out.

She knows he believes he will lose her to the ransom her husband and father might amass, to his and his brother's own plans--she's not sure if it's a kindness or a cruelty on her part that she does not tell him the truth. That she says nothing of the scrap of wood, splintered sharp, hidden beneath the bedrushes where they lie and where he presses his fingers inside of her, makes her gasp with joy and holds her tightly to his chest. She hopes it's a kindness, because she knows the lie is necessary. Whatever might happen to them when they are forced to leave this room, she needs none of her parents' faith to know that he'd sooner cut off his own limbs than let her come to any harm. In these moments in the flickering dark, she feels his love stronger than anywhere else--fierce, and all-consuming, unqualified by other loyalties and vows. He whispers it into her hair as he makes her come undone. In these moments, and all others, she loves him back. Without breaking his gaze she leans down and presses a kiss to the juncture of his shoulder where it meets his chest. He exhales shortly and says nothing; but she feels him shaking.

When she speaks into his skin it's measured, slow, and almost quiet enough for the wind to steal her words away. She almost hopes it does; for they come out sounding mangled somehow.

"I should regret ever meeting you," she starts hesitantly, the words refusing to trip off her tongue. Frustration tinges her voice as she looks for the right words. For any words.

"I shouldn't feel for you as I do." She settles on finally, and presses her lips to his chest again to escape the way he is looking at her. He always looks at her like that, contemplative, listening and considering every word she chooses to say. In this moment, she can't bear it. 

"I can't help it." It comes out like a confession--feels more forbidden than the first time she told him she loved him, certainly, her fingernails digging into his back as she reached her peak and cried out; joyfully, wildly, freely. She tells him again anyway, and again, and he flips them over so she is on her back and there is something serious and truthful in his eyes and he kisses her and kisses her again and all she feels is safe and unfettered, despite the warm, unyielding weight of him against her body as he holds himself above her, pressing into his wrists. When they fuck she wonders if that feeling is what love-making is. She never knew it before she came to this place--and wants, with a startling intensity, to know it with him for as long as they both shall live.

Afterwards she presses against him and he holds her tightly, so his fair beard tickles her brow and she wrinkles her nose, pressing it into his chest. For a dead girl she feels very warm. Their breathing has grown even again and she is drifting around the edges of sleep when he finally speaks into the quiet of the room.

"I cannot give you up." 

It sounds like the revelation of a once-blind man opening his eyes to the dawning sun. He sounds dazed. She can't help but grip on to him more tightly and she feels his surprise at her cognizance in the tensing of his muscles, but he says nothing, only holds her closer to him and drops a kiss into her hair.

When he says it again he sounds resigned--it's sworn, an oath.

"I cannot give you up."

The wind is howling faster now, screaming through the fortress' halls and corridors outside; but it cannot touch them and though the candle flickers in the window it keeps burning, impossible to snuff out. A future opens up before them as it picks up speed and Aethelflaed sees it, lying both in Erik's arms and in a bed drenched in sweat and pain, fighting for the life inside her and her own. He would have brought her apples, and watched her devour them with a grin, pressed his hands to her stomach as if the life she carried inside it was as precious as he had once termed her _._

The yellow light fades and she is alone, her face damp with tears. Erik is dead, and she is as far as she could ever be from the home she'd dreamed for them. The land they would have farmed, its rich soil littered with her apple seeds.

The grief rushes through her like the wind through stone. She hears it howl, and the women flurrying about distantly, speaking in a rush of haste and fear and _it's time_ , prayers rising again and falling but she has no voice to join them, only the awful, raw sound of her loss and pain and Erik and she _screams_ \--

she takes her grief and holds it and pushes and  _pushes_  and her vision is white and

Her daughter's cries ring through the air like silver, biting but warm. One of the women pulls back the shutter finally and the moon is shining, pale and whole. Aethelflaed closes her eyes as she reaches for their babe, and drinks in its light.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not much of a writer but I love their story and it feels wrong to me that those two episodes are all they get. I like to imagine that in an alternate universe they lived out their lives together on a parcel of land with some adventures, but mostly in peace (and maybe aethelflaed became a shieldmaiden, and got all badass with a sword and erik fell even more deeply in love with her than he'd previously thought was possible, idk. it's not like I've spent an unhealthy amount of time thinking about this at all.)  
> (I've also decided that aethelflaed's historical daughter aelfwyn who was supposedly shipped off to a convent by her usurping uncle edward after her mother died ACTUALLY secretly absconded to daneland--aided and abetted by mother hild, of course--to learn more about her father's side of her heritage. and then she became a lady pirate, because why not? but again, it's not like I've overthought this at all :)  
> if you want to come talk/cry about these beautiful human beings with me on tumblr, I'm watsonmycompass xxx


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